Newhall >> Clutching a flashlight and an electromagnetic field detector, Jacob Kire stood in the dark kitchen of the historic Kingsburry House late Friday night poised to make contact with spirits.

Dressed in black and wearing pendants around their necks for protection, Kire and his co-founder of the Inland Empire-based Enlightened Paranormal Investigators of California Mato Wahya, were among those investigating claims of paranormal activity for four hours at Heritage Junction Historic Park next to the William S. Hart Park. While Halloween has become the holiday of thrill seeking and make-believe ghosts, people like Kire and Wahya dedicate a good part of their lives searching for evidence of real spirits and supernatural phenomena.

“Is there anyone here that wants to speak with us right now?” Kire, 38, of Chino asked aloud Friday as another team member recorded the session with an electronic voice phenomena recorder. “My name is Jacob. I bring many friends with me tonight. We’re here to learn more about you.”

Minutes before, Kire said he heard a noise in the Kingsburry House, which was originally built in 1878, that had sounded to him like the voice of a child.

“Do you know if there are any other kids that are around this area right now on the outside?” Kire asked suddenly, while standing in the home’s living room not long after entering with several other people. After a docent accompanying the team said there were not, Kire said: “I could have sworn I heard a ‘hey’ right now.”

Kire, whose organization offers its services free of charge, said the source of the “disembodied voice” that they believe emanated from within the house and which was captured on a recording could not be determined. Thus, he said Tuesday in an email, “we may have had a young child spirit greet us as we explored the Kingsburry House.”

Kire and Wahya are far from alone in their beliefs about ghosts and spirits. Nearly three in 10 Americans said they have felt in touch with someone who has died, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey. Nearly one in five, or 18 percent, said they have been in the presence of a ghost, double the rate it was in 1996.

And ghost hunting is nothing new. It was fashionable in Victorian England for upper-class women to have seances with Ouija boards. The Spiritualist Movement, in which people believe that spirits of the dead have the ability to communicate with the living, emerged in America in the 1800s but died down by the 1920s, historians say.

Since then, “there’s always been a popular interest in ghosts but it’s not really until the past 10 or 15 years that the general public has really gotten into it — in large part because of cable TV with shows like the ‘Ghost Hunters’ — these two Roto-Rooter plumbers who are plumbers by day, ghost hunters by night,” said Benjamin Bradford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and a research fellow with the non-profit educational organization the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

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The problem, he argued, is that many people who are interested in ghosts assume that whatever these guys are doing on TV is scientific. Some try to mimic them, failing to realize these shows haven’t produced any real evidence.

Many ghost-hunting groups “have the trappings of science, their EMF (electromagnetic field) detectors and ghost gadgets and their recorders and things they got at Radio Shack for 50 bucks,” Bradford said. But “none of these devices have ever been shown to actually detect ghosts.”

But paranormal investigators, who say they rely on as much scientific and historical evidence as possible, say their work requires that they walk a fine balance between being skeptical and being open-minded. A noise doesn’t automatically mean a ghost is in the room, Kire said, and other possibilities must be first ruled out.

Linda Casebolt and Bridget Odien of Paranormal Practice, which books private investigations and hosted Friday night’s “ghost hunt” in association with the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society, say they’ve had their own share of other-worldly experiences at Heritage Junction. The historical society, founded in 1975, acquired several historical buildings, including the Saugus Train Station, which first opened in 1887 and today serves as the society’s headquarters and as a museum of local history.

One night some years ago, Odien took several consecutive photos of what she describes as a “Shadow Man” appearing to duck and crawl out of a second story window of the station. She could only see the image through the monitor of her Sony Cyber-shot camera with infrared capabilities, she said. The photos, along with some electronic voice phenomena recordings from various sites, are posted online at www.paranormalpractice.com.

Many ghost hunters say they’ve had inexplicable experiences early in life. Wahya, 38, and also of Chino, recalls coming home from his uncle’s wake as a high school freshman and seeing the deceased man’s figure standing in his room later that night. Odien recalls that as a young child in Connecticut, her closet door would sometimes pop open at night and she once saw three shadowy forms standing next to her bed. Today, she finds investigating the paranormal to be both scary and addictive ­— “like a drug.”

“I just like doing it; maybe, we’re going to get an answer to something,” Odien said, as she puffed on a cigarette outside the train station well past midnight. “But honestly, we’re not supposed to know or there is no purpose to living. I think we’re only supposed to know a little.”